Table of contents for Spring 2018 in Maximum PC

THIS YEAR, I attended my seventeenth CES. That’s many trips to Las Vegas— every year since 2001—to gawk at the latest trends in technology. Each time, there’s something new, and CES continues to evolve. When the show first started, it was mainly about computers, but these days it encompasses any kind of tech that touches people’s lives. This includes cars, medical devices, home automation, TVs, cell phones, and, of course, computers—lots of computers. But then something astonishing happened during the show: On day two of CES, the Las Vegas convention center lost power for nearly two hours. The show floor literally blacked out while I was traversing the endless aisles of booths. After a brief cheer by attendees, everyone then pondered what to do next. There wasn’t anything anyone could…

BEST KNOWN as a supplier of cases, power supplies, cooling kits, and such, NZXT has made the jump to motherboards, with the release of its N7 Z370. And a good-looking thing it is, too. The all-metal shroud comes in black or white, and gives it a cool, sleek look. The chipset and VRM heatsink covers can be had in blue, red, or purple for $15 more. The workings are based around a Z370 chipset and an LGA 1151 socket. It has an integrated RGB lighting controller, and is studded with headers to connect your own light show. It’s not massively cheap, though; it started out at $299, but dropped to $249 after reviews praised its looks but thought it too expensive. It’s an impressive first offering—we hope to see more…

While Meltdown is perhaps the more serious of the two, Spectre may haunt CPU designers for years to come. Both use similar core ideas, with Meltdown attacking via the CPU’s ability to do out-of-order execution (OOOE), while Spectre comes at things via speculative execution. Nearly all modern CPUs utilize these techniques to improve performance, which sometimes results in processors partially executing code that ends up being discarded. Things get cleaned up before the results of any code are finalized, and normally there’s no cause for alarm. The problem is that Meltdown uses the code that partially executes to affect the cache hierarchy, so even though the final execution result is correct, the internal states of the CPU caches get altered. Meltdown uses knowledge of Intel CPU architectures, combined with a…

ROUND 1 Convenience As with any attempt at making comparisons between competing standards, a great many of these categories will be highly subjective— and here’s the first. A wired mouse is fundamentally less convenient than a wireless one, right? By virtue of the fact that you can’t up and leave your desk with it, or pick it up and hurl it at a wall, without it pinging back on its own umbilical cord? Well, yes, and there are also less stupid reasons to appreciate wireless mice. Some are Bluetooth compatible, and can interact with your smartphone or tablet, as well as your PC. The lack of a cord means you’ll never get tangled or snagged at the worst moment. Wireless mice are pretty awesome, both more and less so when…

1 GET AND INSTALL For this guide, we’re going to be using VeraCrypt, which lives at www.veracrypt.fr, so get yourself over to the website, go to the “Downloads” tab, then select the EXE file for Windows systems. Run the installer, ensuring you choose the “Install” option, because that’s the only way it will encrypt your boot drive. Fire up the program, then go to the “System > Encrypt System Partition/Drive” menu. 2 HIDDEN OR NORMAL Before you can start the process, there’s the option of creating a “Hidden” system partition—you won’t want to do this. It’s handy to know about, though, because it enables you to decrypt the drive under duress, and retain plausible denial. We’re not going to cover this, because it requires additional tweaking to have it work comprehensively,…

During the test reboot, if Windows fails to start or your password isn’t accepted, restart the PC, and press Escape at the VeraCrypt login screen. If you have a multi-boot system, choose Windows, else it just starts, and you can choose to remove the bootloader. If the bootloader isn’t appearing, you need to boot from the rescue disk you created (you did, didn’t you?). Insert your USB stick or CD, and wait for the rescue screen. If it doesn’t appear, you need to change the boot device. Many systems offer a boot menu accessed by tapping F9 (HP), F12 (Dell, Lenovo), F8 (Amibios), or F11 (Award BIOS) while booting. The VeraCrypt Rescue Disk screen should now appear. Select “Repair Options” by pressing F8 on your keyboard, then select the “Restore…

Previously, removing the WSL was a case of running PowerShell as Administrator, and typing lxrun /uninstall /full. Now, if Windows 10 is up to date, all you need to do is remove it from the Start menu/ Windows Store. By the time we’ve finishing installing bits, the Linux install will be pushing 1GB, so it’s not something you’ll want hanging around your C drive. We’re frankly doing things here with the WSL that it was never designed to do. In fact, trying to get these things working in earlier builds was far more of a bind than they are now. So, if you find you’re having a few glitches here and there, it’s to be expected. We’re going to leave you here, but there’s plenty of other things you can…

FALCON NORTHWEST (henceforth Falcon) knows a thing or two about building extremely high-end custom PCs. It’s been doing that for 26 years now, and while you can certainly pick up a super-sized Mach V with all the trimmings, for us the Tiki is where it’s at. It measures just 4 x 13.5 x 13.25 inches, and uses a Mini-ITX Asus motherboard, with a custom chassis that you can’t buy anywhere else in the world. The small size is great, but seeing just how much power gets packed inside is what will really turn heads. Starting at the top, there’s the CPU. Falcon sent this rig in with a Core i7-8700K overclocked to 5.0GHz—no mean feat, though we did see some slight throttling to 4.9GHz in a few CPU-intensive workloads. If…

MOTHERBOARDS LIKE THIS don’t come around often. Perhaps it’s due to Coffee Lake’s minuscule power requirements, or maybe because Intel’s mature platform needs little iteration between generations, but the microATX form factor, as we’ve mentioned in this very issue, doesn’t seem to get much love from mobo designers. Which is a shame, because it’s a perfect combination of form and function. Just take a look at the arsenal attached to this 9.6-inch square of PCB joy: two M.2 PCIe SSDs, six SATA 6GB/s ports, dual PCIe x16 slots, USB 3.0 header, five PWM fan headers, and support for 64GB of DDR4 running all the way up to 4,000MT/s. Pretty snazzy. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s more than enough to forge any number of RAID arrays, run SLI and…

WHEN A MANUFACTURER, new to the subtleties of audio-speaker development, launches a headset, the typical reaction of reviewers is to look like a slapped badger. The effect is compounded as soon as their favorite testing track starts to play, pumping out some indistinguishable noise from those dynamic drivers, nothing like the original clarity of the musical delicacy they once loved. The face falls, and the sadness rises. The reason why stems from the corporate world’s disregard for, or inability to understand, its audience. Bean counters and CFOs looking for a quick buck push for corners to be cut. Frequency range and sensitivity suffer, distortion is ignored, and the oh-so-comical “humans can only hear 20-20,000Hz anyway” phrase gets touted in that herp derp attitude often expressed by those who have no…

UNTIL NOW, we’ve typically run with a single zero-point, and benched every system, regardless of spec, at 1080p. The idea being that all of our system reviews, “Build Its,” and other features we produce pit the PC in question against a rig that’s the closest example you can get to an average system at an average res. The problem, however, is that this isn’t exactly fair. For instance, pitting a $9,000 Digital Storm rig up against last year’s $2,000 zero-point doesn’t tell us much, other than it’s better (duh!). And vice versa—a $300 “Build It” versus that same zero-point, well, it just gets hammered. So now we’re going to focus on three separate zero-points, at three separate resolutions and price tags. Each rig we review or build will then be…

Sponsored by Approximate Price: $758 THE CHEAPEST GEFORCE GTX 1050 TI right now costs a staggering $220. That’s $50 more than it was last month, and indeed $80 more than it was at launch. In fact, it’s $20 more than the launch price of the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, which is significantly more powerful. We live in very strange times indeed. Cryptocurrency mining is still the driving force here, and while there are schemes in place to try to sort this out, at the moment, we are left with overpriced cards and systems that cost considerably more than they should. In many respects, it simply isn’t a good time to build a budget system—in fact, a console may even be a better bet in the short term. There aren’t many…

Just after the holidays, Google’s security people, the Project Zero Group, along with a handful of other security research groups, let slip that they had found a potentially nasty security hole in just about every modern processor. News spread quickly, and such was the potential scale of the flaw that the mainstream press took up the story, and did the socially responsible thing of frightening everybody by telling them that their sensitive data was at risk. The breaches quickly earned themselves names—Meltdown and Spectre—and logos. Both exploit loopholes in a chip’s speculative execution procedure, a performance boosting system where the processor makes an educated prediction about imminent procedures, and puts any unused cycles to work on them. To make this efficient, speculative execution functions can be granted a full backstage…

COINCHECK, Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has lost over half a billion dollars in the 8.5 hours it took to detect a security breach. The theft was of 523 million NEM coins—these were launched in 2015, and are currently the tenth largest cryptocurrency. Coincheck has promised to reimburse the 260,000 affected customers a total of $423m, about 90 percent of the loss. The exchange has received an order from the Japanese Financial Services Agency to review and strengthen its security. More official sanctions may follow. Thefts were all from hot wallets, Internet-connected ones. Coincheck stated that the huge majority of it assets were stored offline. What is surprising is that this hack hasn’t dented cryptocurrency markets, despite being the largest theft ever reported. The market remains stubbornly optimistic; 24 hours after…

The past few years have seen a big shift in the way computer applications are used. Long gone are the days when you had to go to a local computer store to buy a CD or stack of diskettes to be able to write up documents or do your taxes. Sure, you can still buy tax software in a store, but it’s more likely that you’ll download the software or use a web application. As more popular applications move to web interfaces, Electron has become a dominant method of displaying web views in a way that makes applications appear native, by using Chromium’s rendering engine. Slack, for example, makes use of Electron to render its web application without the overhead of a full browser. The popular text editor Atom uses…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ULTIMATE BOOT CD 5.3.7 Download the free software from www.ultimatebootcd.com. USB STICK This needs a minimum capacity of 1GB. THERE’S NOTHING WORSE than a machine that seems to have given up the ghost. Windows refuses to boot. Your precious files are locked away. And, without proper diagnostic tools, you can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with the thing, let alone nurse it back to health. That’s where Ultimate Boot CD (henceforth UBCD) comes in. Cobbled together over the course of some 15 years, UBCD is a bootable collection of the best freeware tools for all kinds of rescue tasks. You don’t need to run it from a disc—it’s happy enough to run from USB if you’ve long ago cast off the shackles of optical media—and it can…

Famous uses of the Droste effect, outside of chocolate marketing, include MC Escher, whose 1956 lithograph Print Gallery shows a gallery including a print that depicts the gallery that includes the print... and so on, until it reaches a central void. British psychedelic guitar noodlers Pink Floyd used it on the cover of their 1969 album Ummagumma, changing the repeated image slightly each time so that band members appear to change position. And as far back as 1320, Italian painter Giotto, who would later give his name to a space probe investigating comets, painted a triptych to serve as an altarpiece for one of the altars of Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This depicts the cardinal who commissioned the piece offering the triptych itself to St Peter.…

> Review Granularity > Perfect Prints > Safe Mode Take 2 Scaled to Fit I am a long-time reader of Maximum PC, and love the magazine. However, I’ve noticed a reluctance to use most of your theoretical 11-point scale (1–10, plus 9 Kick Ass) for reviewing products. Out of curiosity, I counted the 2017 occurrences of each rating, and found the following (rating/no. of occurrences): 1/0, 2 /0, 3/0, 4/0, 5/0, 6/7, 7/34, 8/51, 9/30, 9KA/17, 10/0. Thus, you’re using only a five-point rating scale. While I am sure it appeases potential advertisers to never get lower than a midscale rating, your readers would benefit from more differentiation. –Scott Gaboury ALAN DEXTER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, RESPONDS: The key factor when it comes to our reviews is that we don’t review just…

AMD’S RYZEN gave the processor market a jolt, it gave Intel something to think about, and accelerated roadmaps everywhere. And it has no plans to ease off just yet. This April, we should see the second generation Ryzen, the 2000-series or Zen+, code named Pinnacle Ridge. The die shrink from a 14nm process to a 12nm node generally means faster clock speeds, and rumor has it we can expect around 200MHz across the board. AMD also reckons on a 10 percent performance bump from the shrink alone. Internal changes include Precision Boost 2 and Extended Frequency Range. The headline is that boost will now kick in on all cores. Previously, if a game hit multiple cores, however lightly, it jinxed the boost. This stops that. The new chips will use…

We mention keyfiles in the 10-step walkthrough below, largely to say that they don’t work with a system boot drive. However, keyfiles are one of the best ways to improve your encryption security, because they add a second factor of authentication to the procedure—you need both your password and the keyfile (which can be stored anywhere) before VeraCrypt is able to decrypt your data drive or container file. Keyfiles are useful because they boost security, especially if you’re using a weak password. Enable multiple people to access the same file—don’t use a password, just give them all the same keyfile—and it enables shared access when multiple people want a file protected; multiple different keyfiles can be used to lock a volume, and all must be present to open it. Technically, you…

Here at Maximum PC, systems are a big deal. We rarely have an issue that doesn’t feature a build or a system review. They’re integral to the magazine and important to all of us enthusiasts. The thing is, our zero-point benchmarks are starting to look a little antiquated and broken. The theory, up until now, was to use a single mid to high-end build (around $2,400), and bench it at 1080p for all our testing (because 1080p is still the most common resolution). Problem with that is that when it gets compared to 4K pixel-punching powerhouses from the likes of Digital Storm and co, it looks crappy. And when it goes up against our $300–700 budget builds, it wipes the floor with them. The result: It doesn’t actually tell us…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 With the latest Creators Update. HARDWARE A 64-bit processor and at least 1GB free on your C drive. “OH LORDY, NO, NOT THAT LINUX AGAIN!” cries out the rightly indignant Maximum PC reader. “Stop trying to foist that beardy, communist-inspired, open-source nonsense on us!” No one wants to install a whole operating system, just to mess around with a bit of terminal-based garbage, so Microsoft did the right thing, and brought Linux inside Windows, using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Partnering with one of the leading Linux developers, Canonical, it developed the WSL to enable you to effectively install the core of the Ubuntu Linux OS inside of Windows. No mess, no fuss, just pure, simple Windows, with added Linux on top, erm, inside. “Why?”…

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: HARD The Concept RIGHT, let’s break this down quickly, and cover off the pain we suffered building it. In short, we forgot just how much hard work is involved when constructing a rig like this inside such a small case. There’s a certain amount of anguish and scraped knuckles that goes along with building the miniature inside the tiny. And it’s an accepted fact that it’s going to hurt. Yet, despite this, ITX builds will always have an allure, an attractive enticement to any would-be PC enthusiast. Why put yourself through so much torment— with cramped build conditions, frustration, and more—to construct a system that would be just as at home in a mid-tower, as it would here? Well, two reasons. Firstly,…

AH MICROATX, the bastard child of the form factor family. Sitting somewhere between the juggernauts ITX and ATX, it takes the best of both worlds, and condenses it into a feat of efficiency and expandability. It’s one of our favorite form factors. If you’re after a smaller rig, with support for multiple GPUs, more memory, and plenty of I/O, without going huge, it’s a happy compromise. Problem is, being the Goldilocks of the PC world isn’t good enough in today’s age of rapid releases. In a world of bi-yearly processor launches, manufacturers simply don’t have the time to develop boards for this form factor anymore. It’s just not that important in the grand scheme of things. It lacks the mainstream desirability of ATX and the engineering “wow!” factor of ITX,…